Alexa Hart received her first recruiting letter from an Ohio State women’s basketball coach as an eighth grader.

“Jim Foster sent it to me,” said Hart, a senior post player at Africentric High School. “I called everybody. To me, it was like winning the lottery. It made me want to work harder. I framed it.”

Time passed and Foster, then Ohio State’s coach, became an occasional presence at Hart’s games. The Buckeyes also began to receive competition from West Virginia, Dayton, Xavier and other Division I schools.

In mid-March, Ohio State fired Foster and hired Kevin McGuff a month later to replace him. McGuff and his staff suddenly were everywhere that Hart was again. She noticed.

“The new staff came to all of my AAU games,” she said. “They sent me letters. When we were allowed to talk, they would call me or email me every day.”

The renewed interest allowed the 6-foot-3 Hart to cash in that long-ago lottery ticket by committing to Ohio State last week.

“I really like Ohio State,” she said. “I like the people, and Ohio State has what I want to major in (forensic science). Plus, it’s close to home.”

Ranked No. 16 by the ESPN HoopGurlz website and No. 42 by Blue Star for the Class of 2014, she did not come alone.

Kelsey and Chelsea Mitchell, twin sisters from Cincinnati Princeton High School, also have committed to the Buckeyes. They are the daughters of OSU assistant coach Mark Mitchell and also were recruiting targets of the former staff.

Kelsey Mitchell, a 5-9 point guard, is a consensus top recruit nationally, ranked No. 4 by HoopGurlz and Blue Star. She also was a teammate of Hart’s on the All-Ohio AAU team coached by John “J.B.” Bethea for the past two seasons.

They were joined this past AAU season by Kettering Fairmont forwards Makayla Waterman and Kathryn Westbeld.

“I wanted to play with Kelsey,” said Waterman, who plans to take official visits to Ohio State, Purdue and Duke in the fall. “I wanted to get a feel for what that was like and I wanted to be able to tell people that I had played with her once in my life.”

Westbeld has voiced similar feelings about Mitchell. Like Waterman and Alyssa Rice of Reynoldsburg, she remains undecided, with Ohio State as a possibility.

Westbeld reportedly received scholarship offers from Connecticut coach Geno Auriemma and Notre Dame coach Muffet McGraw after Fairmont won the Ohio Division I state championship this past season.

She and Waterman have played together since the third grade and have talked about going to the same college. A parting could come following their senior seasons at Fairmont.